I’ve been trying to sort out the case of Lynne Stewart. She served as a court-appointed defense attorney for an accused terrorist, and she dared to do her best as an attorney by issuing a press release on his behalf. For her adhering to the ethics of the legal profession, she could end up serving thirty years in prison. There are multiple reasons why average citizens should be outraged over this case. First, the government gathered evidence by invading attorney-client privilege with a wiretap. Second, treating advocacy of an unpopular client as a CRIME effectively discourages legal defense for dissenters: it’s already way too difficult for unpopular people (or even invisible people – those who haven’t been able to rally the media or the public to their cause) to find representation. Third, former Attorney General John Ashcroft coordinated his arrest of Stewart with an appearance on David Letterman to “message” the public on his actions: in other words, the government is not only trying to deprive the unpopular of any legal defense, it conducts a PR strategy to MAKE the target unpopular.

One of the primary causes of the erosion of Constitutional (and Human) rights over the last few years has been the willingness of the media to spin litigation. If one of the parties in a case gets initiative in the media, then they win, no matter what the actual facts are. This has encouraged both the government and large corporations to devote their immense resources to pre-trial public relations campaigns. Worse, lawyers now engage in the practice of slipping soundbytes into legal filings in the hope that the press will pick it up. They rely on the fact that the courts themselves don’t discourage lawyer from lying: they simply assume the opposing counsel will challenge the lie. The media, however, doesn’t make that distinction: they know that any quote from a legal document will bear a special aura of authority, yet they rarely issue any sort of disclaimer. Nothing grabs an audience like a cardboard-cutout villain, and the media cares more about garnering an audience than defending the Constitution.

At least in the Lynne Stewart case, there is a serious effort to bring this scandal of injustice to light. You can’t walk two blocks in Berkeley without tripping over a pamphlet or poster. Just remember for every Lynne Stewart, there are countless victims of State tyranny who simply go unnoticed. How long before the entire U.S. legal system turns into Guantanamo? This United States will continue sliding into the abyss of autocracy until its constituent citizenry remembers that everything they value is built on equality under the law and the inalienable rights of the individual – even the unpopular individual.